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“Whether or not you agree with the idea of Black History Month, its purpose as another, parallel window into America is being advanced during months that have nothing to do with February. In important ways, observance of black history as a common American experience has long since slipped the surly bonds of the shortest month of the year. Emancipated. Unchained.”
Philip Seymour Hoffman, synecdoche
“Hoffman was panoramic in his emotional range, but finally, ultimately, he spoke to the pain of his life, and he lived the pain of this life, a covert agent investigating the darker places, the shadows we, all of us, like to think we’re immune to.
“He was that singular that captures and embodies the plural, the one that symbolizes the all. His struggle with chemical demons mirrors our collective struggles with the various demons to be found in the intrinsic toxicity of the modern world. By this fact, there is no cheap postmortem judgment of the man that holds water. He was our synecdoche. His battle with life’s velocity, his demons are, to one degree or another, our very own.”
CBS, NBC and the new late-night eyeball war
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“After a long lull, the War for Broadcast Late-Night Eyeballs is about to recommence. With the departure of Jay Leno later this month, Jimmy Fallon is set to take the reins of “The Tonight Show,” moving the legendary late-night staple back to New York as the show’s youngest host since Johnny Carson.”“The year 2014 starts with new changes afoot at cable television’s most daring petri dish, even as that channel tries to put some of its recent experiments behind it. Way behind.”
The tweet that roared: Justine Sacco's digital object lesson
“If you made it a movie, the sudden saga of Justine Sacco would be the stealth disaster movie on a plane, the one where the heroine can’t see what’s coming because the coming calamity is happening all around her, in real time, and she’s in no position to change what she started, accidentally on purpose.”
Life by Keith Richards
“ … the profane, sentimental, profligate, visionary rock buccaneer archetype the world knows by first name alone has finally committed his Life to print, a bildungsroman that’s as much a biography of a band’s life as an autobiography of his own.”
The Men Who Would Be King
“To go by The Men Who Would Be King, the process of building a Hollywood studio from scratch is, like the genesis of sausage or a nation’s plan for war, not a pretty thing.”
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“With Easy Rider, Hopper gave us a psychic road map to the nation, with Wyatt and Billy the embodiment of our national contradictions: liberty and accountability; the widest-open cultural possibilities and the ethical culs-de-sac we grapple with today.
“In a fictional scenario that anticipated everything from the Kent State killings to the Branch Davidian siege, the film distills just how deeply freedom and authority are fundamentally antagonists, even in America. Sadly, especially in America.”
Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities
Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story
Last Words
“Part raucous credo, part comic pilgrim’s progress, this is George Carlin’s celebration of his own human condition and how he became not just a comedian, but a conscience.”
Burying Don Imus: Anatomy of a Scapegoat
Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass
and Abraham Lincoln
Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds
By the Time We Got to Woodstock: The Great Rock & Roll Revolution of 1969
Homemade Hollywood
"Fan filmdom has always had a pantheon of accidental all-stars whose jury-rig tributes to hit movies, TV shows, and comic books are the stuff of their own legend. [The author] has brought them together here, a cast of true-life characters that constitutes the vanguard of a cinematic mirror on the assertive, improvisational aspect of the national character."
Pop Surf Culture: Behind the Bohemian Surf Boom
Savage Barbecue: A History of America's First Food
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